PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Public Health (24 January 2023)

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will take steps to publish a joint external evaluation on the UK's capacity to (a) prevent, (b) detect and (c) rapidly respond to public health risks occurring (i) naturally and (ii) due to (A) deliberate and (B) accidental events.

Asked by:
Darren Jones (Labour)

There are no current plans to publish a Joint External Evaluation. The Government works with public and private sector organisations as well as academia to understand capacity and capability needs for pandemic preparedness. The United Kingdom also contributes to global monitoring, for example, by completing the World Health Organizations’ (WHO) State-Party Self Assessment Annual Reporting tool (SPAR). There has been no joint evaluation exercise (JEE) conducted to date on the UK’s capacity to prevent, detect and rapidly respond to public health risks in the context set out in this question. However, an evaluation of Public Health England was conducted in 2015 as a trail JEE pre-cursor to WHO's current JEE process, this was a smaller scale pre-cursor to the WHO JEE which the UK was asked to help pilot and assess which is available at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/456984/IndependentReport_GHS_acc.pdf

Answered by:
Maria Caulfield (Conservative)
30 January 2023